An act of God

An act of God
by David Benjamin

“Killing random people in restaurants and at concerts is a strategy that reflects its perpetrators’ fundamental weakness. It isn’t going to establish a caliphate in Paris. What it can do, however, is inspire fear — which is why we call it terrorism, and shouldn’t dignify it with the name of war…”
— Paul Krugman

MADISON, Wis. — After my initial shock over the atrocities in the 11th arrondissement, one of the first thoughts to my mind was of The Three Musketeers, a story also set in Paris, but entirely different — with one significant similarity.

The four swashbuckling musketeers were, of course, totally unlike the suicidal zealots who gunned down unarmed kids at a rock concert. The musketeers were lovable rascals whose every escapade amused and thrilled the common folk of the City of Light. They couldn’t imagine harming innocent Parisians and they had barely a dogmatic bone in any of their bodies.

The parallel here is the musketeers’ mortal enemy. Cardinal Richelieu desecrated the holy robes in which he wrapped himself. The unChristian murder of innocents, in the guise of piety and the name of God, was for him a practical necessity. Had not Richelieu worked constantly to deny freedom — and even life — to everyone over whom he ruled, he would not have ruled.

Richelieu is the epitome of the abuse of religion as political camouflage. He commanded a ruthless force unfettered by the rule of any secular authority. His soldiers were outlaws within the law, answerable only to Richelieu who, according to the law he flouted, was answerable only to the Lord.

Just as Richelieu invoked divine authority in his quest to destroy Athos, Porthos, Aramis and D’Artagnan for their unseemly duelling, carousing, thievery, womanizing and joie de vivre, every religion strives to take these sorts of freedom — and much more — away from people (to save them, of course). We see this imperative in the Bible, with all the Old Testament constraints on dress and diet, sex and marriage, with all its rules about exclusion, ostracism, slavery and in the wholesale slaughter of unbelievers, infidels and foreigners. We see the same bloodthirsty micromanagement, on God’s behalf, in virtually every book of religious dogma. In the name of grace, all faiths deny their faithful a thousand natural impulses which, if exercised, harm no one else and offend no God who has even a vestige of common sense.

One of the freedoms religion loves to take away from people is life itself — a martyrdom that most faiths justify with the assurance that this mortal existence is a pointless and squalid prelude to an afterlife that’s going to be jam-packed with harp music, winged cherubs, ice cream and gorgeous, black-eyed virgins aching to get laid.

The migration of this animus toward autonomy — from the pulpit, mosque and temple to the sphere of politics — is as humanly inevitable as the elevation of Richelieu from humble cleric to mob boss. Give a priest a taste of power and it goes straight to his head. It could even end up with someone else — or a lot of someone elses — losing his head.

Paris is a place long associated with the sort of freedom that’s condemned and deeply despised by jealous clerics and pious psychopaths.

Perhaps the most cogent eulogy addressed to the Paris tragedy was that of Chancellor Angela Merkel: “Those whom we mourn were killed in front of cafés, in restaurants, in a concert hall or on the open street. They wanted to live the life of free people in a city that celebrates life. And they met with murderers who hate this life of freedom.”

Indeed, Paris is the world capital of love and romance, sex, jazz, champagne, peek-a-boo lingerie, gourmet food, naked dancing, hedonism, miscegenation and pet poodles who eat nothing but foie gras. For centuries, it has been reviled — by cardinals and mullahs, rabbis and patriarchs, jihadists and missionaries, Puritans, Pentecostals, tight-ass Presbyterians and every vote-hungry rightwing Republican in the US Congress — as the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Western World.

Paris is, for the true believers of their own one true faith, the fount of evil. And Parisians, who are too free for their own good, are the tough-luck folks you’ve got to start killing — like Midianites, Canaanites, and all those sodomites in Gomorrah — if you’re going to stomp out evil once and for all.

For most of us, and especially those who have lived in Paris and loved its every idiosyncrasy, the great dying that occurred on Friday the 13th was a crime beyond both imagination and forgiveness. But the killers have subconscious disciples of every faith for whom each free act chosen freely is a near occasion of sin, for whom any self-indulgence is an abomination, for whom a noisy, boozy, sexy music-hall like the Bataclan is a pit of iniquity.

Few God-fearing Christians (or Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Scientologists, etc.) will say that “Paris had it coming.” Nor will they think it. The horror is too profound for that level of callousness (well, Richelieu might have smirked). But all the religions, cults, sects and gods man has erected as bulwarks against the mystery of death stare a common mission: to deny as many perilous freedoms — from ourselves and from a world full of non-believing strangers — as we can take away.

I don’t think the Paris jihadists were any more religious than anyone else — and probably less so. But they depended on the bloodthirsty dogma of thousands of years and hundreds of creeds, to undergird and justify their massacre. In the fleshpots of Paris, they saw pleasure without guilt, joy without penance, and they knew this was bad. And they knew how to punish it. Their forebears are countless.

If fun is sin, as so many have been taught to believe, then Paris was until Friday the naughtiest city in the world.

Here’s the good news. It will be again — probably before Christmas.